Category Archives: Papaji

You might purchase a car or buy an apartment or meet a friend and you are happy. Why do these things bring you happiness? You are attracted to a particular person, or to a particular car, or to a particular apartment made of bricks and cement. It is not the steel, the rubber, or the benzene that brings happiness with the car. Nor is it the bones, flesh, blood, or marrow in a person. When you are happy you recognize the Self within the self, and you are free of desire. When you get a car your hope is gone, your desire for the car has left you. When you meet a friend your desire for the meeting is no longer there. When you buy an apartment your wanting to have an apartment is no longer there. This emptiness without desire or hope has given you happiness. If you know that it is this emptiness from the hope and desire that brings you happiness then you can always keep your mind empty. Then where is the problem to be happy wherever you are – walking, talking, sitting, standing, sleeping – you can be happy.

Who am I indeed. Who is it that could ask such a circular question? Better yet, who could ask it and not know the answer? What details about the “who” is the asker expecting to learn?

And don’t details sound an awful lot like content. Content being all that you are not as almost any rookie seeker may have read. The old saying “The devil is in the details” certainly takes on a whole new meaning.

It can only be the mind that asks for more information, more facts, and more guidance. Any ever-present, unchanging, observing self can have only a very limited interest in the question, who am I.

“I am that I am” as God said to Moses.

However, through this inquiry the seeker learns that the question itself has become another obstacle. Another quest of the mind on the journey to absolution. To continue to ask it is to remain trapped in your head.

Therefore the question must burn itself up. Forever it must remain unanswered, at least in the conventional sense. “Call Off The Search” as the title of Papaji’s documentary instructs.

It is better to keep quiet than for the mind to keep busy with questions. “Silence is the language of God” as Rumi famously said.